Re: [Plplot-devel] x20c.c

[Joao C. <jca...@in...>]

On Friday 30 November 2001 17:02, Geoffrey Furnish wrote:
| Jo=E3o Cardoso writes:
|  > You want to write a tutorial; I just want to show that it can be
|  > done. You want to write code that users can modify to theirs needs; =
I
|  > just want to show them that it can be done.
|  >
|  > I profoundly disagree (as you said) on puting library dependencies o=
n
|  > demos. It is not a question of being nice to have color images, but =
a
|  > question of software development.
|  >
|  > What do others think?
|
| I want to steer clear of any headstrong stance here myself, but I do
| have some thoughts.
|
| I also believe "demos" should be minimalist in their linkage
| requirements.  But I also believe more extended examples could be
| valuable.
|
| I duno if anyone remembers, but long ages ago, I once mentioned that I
| had hacked a raster capability into a development copy of plplot,
| using a new plescape hook in xwin.c.  I never got around to committing
| that.  The reason (well, among a host of others, including the whole
| business of finding a hosting arrangement for PLplot) was that that
| particular program was not only an example of an image display
| capability, but it was also parallelized, using either Pthreads or
| MPI.  (It was a parallel mandlebrot calculator, displaying to xwin).
| So it was a /very/ complex example program.  I could not figure out
| how to package an MPI example program into a suitable state for
| distribution with PLplot.  Then the pressures of work diverted my
| attention until it was effectively abandonded.
|
| In general, I guess I favor having some mechanism to exhibit
| "extensive examples" (potentially with substantial external linking
| requirements), but I just don't think the "demos" is the right medium
| for such expositions.  In my former case mentioned above, I had always
| sort of wanted to set up something else, a new class of demos or
| something.  In other words, not call it a demo, but call it a
| contrib/example/XYZ, or something.

Yes, of course! I think that this is the solution!

| So, it seems to me that something similar is waranted in this case
| too.  I agree with both of you.  There is a need for demos to be
| simple, and a need for extensive examples to be exhibited.  My
| suggestion is to somehow think of a packaging technique that puts the
| extensive, external dependency laden examples, into a seperate
| collection.  Probably each of those has to be separately configured,
| based on the availability of various --enable-xyz options, drivers,
| libraries, etc.
|
| Because its so much work to set something like that up, that's why
| I've never done it.
|
| Gotta run.